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Wednesday, 15 January 2014

Road Maps

For some time now politicians have been
flinging “road maps” at us. Not Planners mind, or Traffic Engineers, but Politicians.
The most visible of these road maps has been in connection with the Palestinian
Israeli conflict, but there are also other geopolitical “road maps” for
removing military interventions, and there are many others dealing with issues
as diverse as nutrition, education and health. In short any issue in need of
some form of resolution is assigned a “road map” that will somehow describe how
to solve the problem.

Quite where this semantic absurdity first
sprang from I don’t know, and frankly I can’t be bothered to find out, but you
can bet your bottom dollar it was some vocabularian challenged manager in USAID
or DFID or some similar acronym, such as, yes, the UN! Its provenance will not
really help as an explanation of its meaning – which is, of course,
intentionally obscure, and which on reflection suggests phony management speak
from the Harvard School of Business Talk.

Lets unpack
this (hardened management speak) and work
with me on this one (folksy management speak). Pardon the baby talk but you
do have to drop into the vernacular to explain the bizarre! So, moving on - “Road Maps” then . . .

As a reminder a Road Map originated as a
two dimensional depiction of a system of thoroughfares. It shows a grid of a
variety of different interconnecting road types in relation to each other and to
various points of interest, such as towns, lakes, beaches, war memorials, mountains
and such like.

From this invaluable information a driver
or navigator (conventionally the driver’s wife) can plan and execute a journey
between points “A” and “B” and successfully arrive at their destination safely and
in a frame of mind sufficiently stable to mutually commence divorce
proceedings. The beauty of the “Road
Map” is of course that once several “left turns” have been misconstrued as
“right turns” – either because it was the wrong “left”, or because “left” was
misheard as “right” – then alternative routes can be found through careful
scrutiny of the aforesaid Road Map based upon the knowledge of ones actual
position, which of course is rarely where you actually expect to be.

To digress ever so slightly my abiding
childhood memories of road journeys were of my Mother having to turn the road map
(which was bound in convenient book form) upside down in order to orientate
herself with the road ahead. This of course meant that effective speed reading of
place names and road numbers was a bit of an issue when travelling South (or
East or West for that matter). More recently there have been occasions too
numerous and embarrassing to recount where my Wife and I have got hopelessly
lost because we have a road map rather than relying upon and following
our instincts. Mind you I’m not so sure that our instincts are particularly
reliable. Family journeys often degenerated into rows of such intensity that
the daughters threatened us that they would rather get out and walk and leave
us to get more helplessly lost on our own.

Latterly of course there are sat-nav
devices which apparently (I've never succumbed) describe in real time the
navigational mistakes you are making and direct you in an androgynous, pseudo
mid-Atlantic accent towards unfamiliar, narrow, single lane cul-de-sacs in
violent, unlit, gang infested down-town neighbourhoods.

Okay then so that’s a “Road Map” – a barely reliable diagram of
lots of roads connecting lots of places together. It’s a sort of two dimensional
tapestry that bears no relationship whatsoever to real life. I challenge you to
look out of the window of your car at any point on a journey and be able to identify where
you are on your road map. “Look at that lovely pink flowering tree over there;
we are obviously here on the map”!

For some crazed reason the aforesaid
politicians and their cohorts of political planners and think-tankers have
created a euphemism for a plan. It might be a plan of action (a rarity), a plan
of in-action (by the planners), a plan cloaked in secrecy (more often than not),
or a plan that is actually so obscure that few except the planners can actually
understand it.

The fact is that in order to achieve the
aims of a plan there needs to be a process, and, I do accept, that a process
may be defined as a “route” if you really want to analogise (and this is a word
of such supreme ugliness that only an American spell checker would both
recognise and accept without demur. Try it out and see!)

A route describes a process and can
delineate that process in relation to various mile-stones (another wonderful
road typology analogy!). If you want to be really clever or (heaven forefend)
lyrical I am sure that there are poetic ways of describing the route in
relation to the socio-political landscape in order to make the plan sexier or less
unpalatable for those who might be most adversely affected by it.

But let’s unpack “Roads” as an entity.

Here again is the use of a comfortable
familiar little euphemism that is used to wrap up something of far greater
import, or complexity, or perhaps danger than the man in the street, or for
that matter a reporter behind a lap-top keyboard can really comprehend. Wrapping
it up in cheerful Christmas present paper will somehow make it all so much more
a folksy, white picket fence solution.

Roads in their conventional form are an
uneconomical and environmentally damaging vector for transporting goods and
people. In many geo-economies they are a very poor alternative for distributing
heavy goods between places of manufacture and places of distribution for
consumption. For many people roads are riotous, dangerous, stinking, potholed
causeways of people, animals and belching vehicles. For others they are strips
of hard surfaces along which highly expensive machines are propelled at speeds
fifty times faster than the average person can walk. Between these two extremes
there are any number of types of thoroughfare, serving any number of types of
neighbourhood or purpose. What is common to all of them however is the role
they play in environmental degradation and national and international mortality
and injury rates.

According to Wikipedia (the fount of all
popular stats!) car crashes are the 6th most lethal activity in the
developed world and the 11th most lethal activity worldwide. The source
readily admits that the statistics quoted are outdated but the fact remains
that roads per se are a major
contributor to world-wide mortality rates. Stretching this line of
investigation to almost snapping point (we are in the realms now of Mitchells Law), in 2004 it was estimated
that worldwide 1.2 million people were killed (2.2% of all deaths) but on top
of that 50 million more were injured in motor vehicle collisions. The global
economic cost of traffic accidents was estimated then (2003) at $518 billion
per year of which $100 billion occurred in developing countries.

So there you have it. In order to dress up
some geo-political strategy, or some form of socio-political policy; the
politico-planner invokes the phrase “road-map” to cloak an unpalatable or
frankly arcane set of actions in a folksy framework; without any real thought
of the implications of such.

So next time you hear some politician
bleating about a “road map” for the withdrawal of troops from a country they
shouldn’t have invaded in the first place, or read a press release from an
international aid agency pontificating about an “education road map that is a
multi-stakeholder document on education priorities” bear with them and give
them the benefit of the doubt that they really don’t deserve. Ignore the fact that
a “map” is not “route” or a pathway and try not to visualise the essentially chaotic
nature of roads which are responsible for more worldwide deaths than many forms
of cancer and are responsible for more avoidable costs than the annual GDP of
most medium sized states.

You may of course want to have a quiet
chuckle about the fact that this daft euphemism is actually nearer to the truth
than most would want to admit – because the cause of the situation now
in need of a “road map” was actually as chaotic, damaging and unavoidable as the
euphemism now being employed as a description of the palliative.